Quote:
Originally Posted by tbone
A question about your example, though, of the SM -5 skull-shaped robot vs the game's canonical -7 TH skull location. You call that a mismatch, but I wonder whether you're taking the RAW skull hit location to mean the actual entire skull. Because my understanding is that the game's skull location – by design, and setting strange terminology aside – isn't actually the skull, but rather what should be called the skullcap. Just the brain area, that is – which could be considered about half the size of the whole skull, and thus -7 instead of -5 TH.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull "The skull is composed of two parts: the cranium and the mandible. In the human these two parts are the neurocranium and the viscerocranium or facial skeleton that includes the mandible as its largest bone."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skullcap#Other_uses liks to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvaria_(skull) described as "the upper part of the neurocranium".
You have a major point here, since "skull" in regular terminology includes mandible (ie the lower jaw bone, I think corresponding to the new hit location in martial arts) and this -6 location isn't treated as a sublocation of the -7 location, a term like "cranium" would be more specific.
"Neurocranium" (also termed "braincase" and "brainpain") seems even more specific, because it refers to the braincase. The term viscerocranium actually appears to refer to the face.
The calvaria/skullcap is only part of the "skull roof" so that's probably too specific. It'd probably be something like "skull only, top only" DR, whereas neurocranium and I think the intent of the -7 hit locatio you can target from front/sides (or from back at -5) is I think supposed to be DR composing an entire surrounding structure from all directions.
Since the neurocranium is composed of multiple bones and fractures could occur on specific sides of it, I guess you could come up with some kind of sub-locations where each direction has its own semi-ablative DR, as 10 crushing seems enough to fracture a skull: the 8 damage penetrating 2 DR is multiplied by 4 and -32 is enough to send a human with 10 HP to negative 22, forcing 2 death checks)